DDN announced the latest addition to its  powerful A³I solutions, the AI400X2, which delivers twice the performance of the previous generation appliance in the same footprint, furthering A³I performance leadership among AI data systems. Additional performance and usability enhancements introduced with the AI400X2 include Hot Node integration and a streamlined intelligent user interface to accelerate and simplify enterprise IT operations. 

The AI400X2 joins the lineup of A³I appliances that are deployed today and powering thousands of NVIDIA DGX systems globally across a wide range of production environments in financial services, life sciences, healthcare, and autonomous vehicle industries. The enhanced speed, efficiency and intelligence of the AI400X2 moves organizations toward an increasingly hands-off approach to AI application management that improves competitiveness and overall customer experience without sacrificing security. 

"We designed this next generation of A³I solutions to give customers the most efficient, scalable and reliable AI data platform," said Dr. James Coomer, senior VP of products, DDN.  "Customers continue to turn to DDN to remove the complexity from their AI initiatives. AI is a powerful business enabler, and the AI400X2 will help customers get into production faster and reduce time to results."

As organizations develop increasingly sophisticated AI applications and constantly introduce new data types into their analysis, they seek faster and more scalable storage systems that can transparently provide data services to a wider variety of users and systems. To optimize application performance and minimize network congestion, DDN has introduced Hot Nodes, a technology developed in collaboration with NVIDIA, which intelligently caches files to the client's local flash storage.   

New intelligent UI capabilities include granular visibility into AI workloads and client GPU-level utilization to simplify configuration management and system monitoring, and optimize end-to-end performance.

Security is always among the top IT priorities for valuable AI applications. New A³I client-side encryption and role-based access control configurations and policies give IT teams powerful tools to further strengthen AI data security.

"The NVIDIA DGX A100 system is designed to tackle the world's most challenging AI workloads, from natural language processing to computer vision to autonomous systems, and is used by many organizations to power their AI centers of excellence," said Charlie Boyle, VP and general manager of DGX systems, NVIDIA. "High-performance storage is essential to AI infrastructure, and DDN's newest storage appliance, the AI400X2, provides a platform that can rapidly supply data for the most demanding AI development requirements on NVIDIA DGX systems."

DDN supplies data management solutions to more than two-thirds of the top supercomputers globally, including the world's most powerful system, Riken's Fugaku, and NVIDIA Selene, the largest commercial AI system and sixth fastest supercomputer. Other AI systems around the world rely on DDN solutions for their unique combination of performance, advanced capabilities and ease of management for AI and analytics applications of all sizes. DDN A³I solutions and reference architectures with NVIDIA start with two DGX A100 systems and can scale to more than 500 DGX A100 systems with its DGX SuperPOD^TM Reference Architecture.

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